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03 Oct, 2016 12:29 PM

C2C Partnership event

The EU-India FI-MEDIA project, a project supported by the Delegation of the European Union to India, whose mission is to create cluster to cluster partnerships (C2C) between EU and India counterparts within important topics related to Future Internet, has created a C2C partnership on the use of the EU’s development platform FIWARE in the India setting, and, more specifically, in the settings of smart cities, including smart villages. As a follow up to their C2C meeting on this topic in January, 2016 and May, 2016, an FI-MEDIA C2C partnership event was held on 19th September, 2016, bringing together stakeholders from EU and India entitled "FIWARE – Industry - Developers Workshop".

FIWARE is an EU led initiative that was started in 2009 as part of a Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP), which is comprised of an Advanced OpenStack-based Cloud + rich library of Generic Enablers (GE) that make the development process much easier by hiding complexities (e.g. protocols) from the developers.

The FI-MEDIA project has teamed up with Smart Cities Lab India, based in Mumbai, India, with the strong support of the FI-PPP Steering Board, based in the EU. The concept of the Lab India is to invite all interested stakeholders from students’ communities, academics and professionals’ world to join hands and spread the FIWARE platform to the advantage of a new ‘smart’ living. Together, through the FI-MEDIA C2C partnership programme, Smart Cities Lab India and FI-MEDIA are committed to expand the group and promote FIWARE by working closely with corporates, start-ups incubated within Institutions of higher learning (IITs/IIMs), and college students via workshops, internships, lab and competitive schemes.

With this purpose in mind, a full day clustering partnership event was hosted at the Department of Management Studies (DMS) at IIT Delhi on 19th September, 2016, bringing together all of the above stakeholders with a goal of showing how over 1,000 FIWARE based services are already enabling business acceleration in relevant sectors such as Smart Cities, Agri-Food and Manufacturing and to show how FIWARE’s mature technologies and wide-reaching open innovation and business ecosystem can rapidly open up new business opportunities to drive India’s digital revolution and boost the India economy.

Opening the C2C workshop, M.P. Gupta, Dhananjay Chair Professor & Head of Department, DMS, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, (IITD) and co-partner of EU-India FI-MEDIA, said, "The „Government of India (GoI)" initiatives towards developing 100 smart cities triggered enormous interest as it opened up vast opportunities to connect, collaborate and co-create a new landscape of living. Since then, in subsequent discussions fora, we feel there should be a focus on something more like 500, including smart villages, as the supply chain including "smart ICT’s" needs to be harmonised between cities and rural areas. IIT Delhi especially welcomes the EU FIWARE team from Smart Cities Lab India and we look forward in today's workshop to learn about FIWARE’s technologies and how it can open up new business opportunities in the context of smart cities and smart villages and contribute to the Digital India programme ".

According to the Technical Report published in November 2015 from Telecommunication Engineering Centre (TEC) India on ICT deployments and strategies for India's Smart Cities:…Cities will increasingly move from being service providers to platform ones, providing an infrastructure that enables the development of a broad range of public and private applications and services. Standardized technologies and infrastructures is a prerequisite for the development of Smart Cities. "The report recommend explicit "instead of replicating infrastructure for every city in a state, ideally it makes sense that the different Smart Cities in a State leverage the State level Infrastructure".

According to Olaf-Gerd Gemein, CEO of Smart Cities Lab global network and Chair Steering Board Future Internet Public Private Partnership (FI-PPP), “FIWARE, as a technology agnostic and royalty-free middle-platform, can be deployed on any existing technical infrastructure, hence providing Open API north- as well southbound. By this, Smart Cities Lab, powered by FIWARE and OpenStack, enables effectiveness of delivery through integration and efficiency through dynamic workload migration and sharing of resources. A city platform based on FIWARE and OpenStack is capable of working as a „glue“, to support the many ‘smart’ projects and cases already envisaged, to allow the development of others as yet not conceived, and to enable the use of the new technologies and standards which are still evolving. The actual momentum, as 37 (plus 63 to be nominated later) cities in India facing the same challenge to choose the „right“approach, clearly making FIWARE today the platform of choice. Kickstarting with IIT Delhi in India now, we are looking forward to support all Smart Cities in India!”, concluded Mr. Germein.

James Clarke, Waterford Institute of Technology, EU-India FI-MEDIA coordinator, concluded, “The FI-MEDIA project is delighted to be working with Smart Cities Lab India in bringing FIWARE to the India context in smart cities, including smart villages, as part of one of our C2C partnerships activities, whose principle objective is to partner EU and India clusters on mutually beneficial topics. Furthermore, our C2C partnerships are designed to have sustainability as a guiding principle and having an initiative on board like Smart Cities Lab India that has business development as a core principle will ensure that sustainability will be achieved in a more commercialised setting."

In the concluding part, Abhishek Sharma, Managing Director of Beyond Evolution Tech Solutions Pvt Ltd, a Gurgaon based company working in the IOT / Mobile Solutions domain and Co-Partner to the FI-Media project, elaborated the concept of C2C partnership and explained the sustainability model as guiding principle behind effective C2C partnership. A format for identifying the common areas of interest and selection of topics of mutual interest for the C2C partnership, “C2C Cooperation Topic Matrix", was also discussed in his talk. On the role of FIWARE towards the industry, in conjunction with the FI-Media , he stated “The industry, with ever growing demands for providing more and more innovative solutions, is always hungry for tools and support platforms like FIWARE that can enhance the speed of development, quality and overall productivity of the solutions. The FIWARE platform, its enablers and various FIWARE Labs can play a very effective role in improving the capabilities of the Smart Cities’ solutions. The FIWARE platform, with its open source - open contribution philosophy, can harness the potential of the multitudes, make healthy supplements for the excellence of few and, thereby, become a superb contributor to the Software development fraternity. Smart Cities India Labs and EU-India FI-Media jointly should be able to promote the collective wisdom of the Industry and Research segments and establish Cluster to Cluster partnerships between EU and India that would become shining bright lights capable of making great contributions towards building Smart Societies."

The workshop was broken into two halves:

1. Smart City Lab India / Industry Business Opportunities session for clustering around business opportunities between the EU and India in areas related to Smart Cities, Smart Villages, and the use of EU’s platform FIWARE in these opportunities.

2. FIWARE developer workshop demonstrating the benefits of the Open platform FIWARE with tutorials and the setting up of real examples (e.g. IoT apps) for Smart City environments.

The full day C2C event covered the following aspects:

The purpose of the EU-India FI-MEDIA project in facilitating C2C partnerships between EU and India;